The Mandate needs your help

There is a TON of stuff on Kickstarter, and not everything on there is worthy of your attention. That said, there is one particular game that is struggling to meet their goal, and I can guarantee would be of interest to a great many of you. I’m talking about The Mandate. The Mandate is built on the Unity engine, and you can actually take a small bit of it for a drive right now, including a ship designer and an interactive prologue. Above you can see the Kickstarter video package they’ve put together, and if the concept wows you the way it did me, you can click here to help fund it. I can say that this game has the most fleshed out and impressive concept art and backstory of any Kickstart I’ve seen to date. They are currently at $300,000 out of a $500,000 funding goal, with 12 days to go. If you are going to contribute, now’s the time! Here’s a bit from the team themselves:

There are a lot of sci-fi rpgs out there, some are popular, most of them not so popular. So, being such big fans of the sci-fi genre naturally we wonder why so many games that feature flying around the galaxy in a spaceship feel so empty? What’s missing? looking back to all the TV and Movies that inspire us, like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, etc. we realized something. What about the Crew? Where’s the microcosm within the ship that makes all our favorite sci-fi shows so great? We want to make a game you are not a starship, you are a Captain commanding a starship with crewmembers that grow with you as they fight by your side. That’s where the drama is, that’s where the story happens, it’s the interacting with people on the ground floor that makes this a complete experience.Example: I want to walk up to Frank from engineering and talk about how we need to find his long lost daughter back on Glesa183. I want my apprentice Lydia to survive her first flight test for her officer training. I want to find out who the rebel saboteur is amongst my men. That means, when I enter into battle the stakes are high. If I fail to command my ship then my valuable crew members could be killed by a hull breach or a boarding party. I want to insure the safety of my people, because they aren’t just my crew, they’re my family.”

#2 We want to provide a game experience that is designed for singleplayer but seamlessly supports opt-in cooperative. We feel there is a vacuum today or an untapped market for good cooperative games. Either you have singleplayer games with some cooperative element thrown in, or you have a fully multiplayer/MMO game with some singleplayer thrown in. We have experience developing both singleplayer, multiplayer and MMO games, and we have decided to tackle this cooperative challenge.

We also have a backstory trailer to share with you that tells you about the story that Perihelion Interactive LLC is trying to tell.

Privately, the team has also shared a character builder and some of the music that they’ve begun to build. You’ll have to take my word on it that it’s as impressive as I’m making it out to be, but you can see a short video for that here as well:

The ship construction build I received was shockingly lightweight (just a few megs in size) and already very far along, featuring physics, some advanced destruction models, and some solid texture work. Yep, we’ve got video for that too.

I’m asking you all, personally, to not let this Kickstart fail. The game will cost you $20 bucks during the Kickstarter phase – I guarantee you’ve spent far more than that during the Steam Sale on games you’ve never played. Let’s make it happen people.